Peter Figen
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"Is it something that we love only because it is part of our past?"
No, it's something we love because of the organic feel of the image. Sure, digital is great and it's often the right tool for the job, especially for the tight deadlines and diminishing budgets of commercial photography, but film is far from dead. We like it for the same reason we like vacuum tube amplifiers for sound and photomultipliers for our scanner sensors. There is a smoothness in how film rolls off into specular highlights that digital renders very harshly. Adding "digtital" film grain to simulate film can help but does not accomplish the same thing. Take a 35mm Kodachrome, Velvia or T-Max100, drum scan it at 8000 ppi and make a 40 X 60 compared to a 1DsMKIII image of the same scene. Yeah, you'll have some grain and the digital may be slightly sharper, but you'll almost always prefer the look of the film especially when you start looking at the artifacts. I'm the first one to admit that it's rarely possible to shoot film on commercial work today, but for those who say film is dead or that there is no use for it are completely off base. If you want the best black and white images you can get, you really do need to shoot film and if you've never seen what a really good drum scan can pull from a great piece of film, well, you really should.
"Color printing, on the other hand, has always been the bane of the color photographer—the chemistry's horribly toxic, there are very limited paper choices, and there's no real control over saturation, contrast, or local color."
Perhaps you never used Pan Masking film, which of course, you could expose with color filters to affect the contrast and look of the mask. Perhaps you never burned or dodged with color printing filters - localized color and density corrections. Sure, the controls aren't as fine as we have now for digital, but there were some great controls available if you wanted to take the time to learn them.
That being said, for all but the largest color prints and situations where you need high quantities of actual photographic prints, there's very little reason for doing chemical prints. For the most part, inkjets have effectively, and I mean that in the best sense of the word, replaced chemical prints, exposed analog or digitally.
Black and white is still a very viable especially when treated as a hybrid process - shooting black and white film, drum scanning it and either outputting a new LVT piece of film for darkroom printing or printing inkjet.
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